Documents and Settings woes

[John Collins]

Due to a motherboard burnout on my laptop I had to remove its hard drive
and copy its files to a backup external hard drive. I didn't include the
Windows folder in the files. What the copying process would not allow is
the the copying of the folder within Documents and Settings with my name on
it. I was told that the file was locked or that the hard drive was full.
Any suggestions as to how I can copy that subfolder?

Thanks,
John

 

[james hanley]

Due to a motherboard burnout on my laptop I had to remove its hard drive
and copy its files to a backup external hard drive. I didn't include the
Windows folder in the files. What the copying process would not allow is
the the copying of the folder within Documents and Settings with my name on
it. I was told that the file was locked or that the hard drive was full.
Any suggestions as to how I can copy that subfolder?

Thanks,
John

You haven't said what drive you're booting from. i'm no expert in win
xp's private folder or on NTFS attributes, but - failing to find a
direct solution - I would work around it.

it's probably an ntfs thing or maybe you booted from the drive and a
process locked the folder somehow. But I would just work around it.
When you copy files from the laptop drive, do not boot off of it, but
connect the laptop HDD up to a desktop as a secondary HDD. If you
still have problems(maybe private folders still can't be viewed ), then
- an aweful workaround would be to use partition magic to convert the
laptop HDD to FAT32.

I'm sure there's a more direct solution though. Consider this advice as
a last resort (no risk but a bit of a hassle when a more direct
solution probably exists).

Laptop HDDs are 2.5" IDE not 3.5" like desktop HDDs.
You'll need a cheap kit with a 2.5"-3.5" IDE Cable and an adaptor
thingy to power up the laptop HDD.

An alternative is to get a USB-IDE(3.5") adaptor and a 2.5-3.5 adaptor.
And plug the laptop HDD(2.5") into your USB port. So laptop HDD goes
into 2.5-3.5 adaptor into USB-IDE(3.5") adaptor, into USB port.


I hope somebody posts a better solution!!!

 

[neil]

You need to check out "take ownership" in the Help & Support. You should be
able to take ownership of the folders within your login name and this will
allow you to copy them.

Neil

 

[John Collins]

James and Neil,
Thanks for your suggestions. The folder is still locked. An interesting
thing that I noticed is that there is no "+" sign to the left of the
problematic folder suggesting that there are no subdirectories. This can't
be the case, so who knows what is going on.


John

 

[james hanley]

how are you copying the files from the laptop hard drive to the backup
drive? -- since you don't have the laptop anymore to boot off that
drive?!